Happy Union Christmas

Yes, you read right, because in the world of Sheffield University, today is Christmas day. Sadly no presents or Christmas meal this year due to a complete lack of organisation but I'm hoping we can make up for that after the January exams. At this time of year, people start to go a bit doolally through overwork and today is a day to forget about everything and go on an 20 hour binge, Bar One opens its doors bright and early in the morning with some people having been there queuing since about 6am! Various offers on food and drink throughout the day keep everyone entertained as well as some special guests. This year we were treated to James Buckley (Jay from the Inbetweeners) who apparently was rubbish, he was doing a DJ set and pretty much stood there and watched the music playing (so I'm reliably informed). He doesn't strike me as a particularly charismatic person but you'd have though that if he is hiring out his services as a DJ then he would be able to perform to the crowd and get them going a little bit more.

The other special guests were a bit better, Comedy Dave and Dom from the Chris Moyles show on Radio 1. We've been visited by Chappers and Dave several times but I believe that this is Dom's first visit to our neighbourhood. As usual they played games and music and made derogatory comments about Hallam - something that always seems to go down quite well.

So that managed to kill a fair few hours and I am now even more behind with my A-Z countdown and some late night TV viewing didn't help either.
On the subject of which, we shall kick off with the NMTB Dr Who special. Turns out there was no explanation as to why Jamie Cullum was on the panel as he didn't even seem to be a fan. The star of the show was Catherine Tate though and it almost seemed like she had been taking something or been heavily drinking because she was all over the place! Saying that, I might have to change my mind now because Bernard Cribbins was hilarious! I always imagined him to be a gentle old man but he wasn't that at all, he was coming out with some of the funniest jokes in the show and was almost as off-beat as Noel (who invited him to help write for the Boosh). I was laughing out loud almost every other line for pretty much the whole of the programme which doesn't happen very often. I strongly suggest anyone who missed it to check it out here.

The other programme of the night was Waterloo road which all seems to be culminating in Max's departure at the moment. After paying off the pupils to keep quiet in the class being inspected, Miss Hopewell passes the inspection to the surprise of Rachel although she is later grassed up by the student she paid. Her refusal to continue paying the girl £50 a week to make her life easier angers the girl who is one of the central characters in this episode and ends up losing all of her friends because she is continually being disruptive, bossy and self important. Her final blow is when she brings Miss Hopewell to tears during a lesson by constantly taunting and mocking her and whilst I think she deserved to go, I am horrified that some students would act like that towards a teacher. As she leaves, Miss Hopewell leaves the CD with the video of her and Max on it with Rachel who finds out and puts him back in his place. He also confides in Chris to keep another of his secrets and Chris gets a bit annoyed and threatens to report him to the board if anything else like this happens, especially referring to threatening Rachel. The only people who seem to have any sympathy for Max are Mrs Fry and Kim who is blinded by love and cannot see through all the lies. You know it can only end one way though, he has a temper and he is a compulsive liar and even when Kim gives him the chance to tell him any other little secrets that he has buried, he decides to lie once again and keep his relationship with Miss Hopewell quiet. Rachel confronts Max about the CD but decides to destroy it rather than keep the temptation to dog him in and somehow managed to snap the CD in half. Max did the same thing in an earlier episode and I want to know where the hell they get these magic CD's that snap from. They must be special prop CD's becuase everytime I've tried a similar activity, they have been a) very difficult to break in the first place, and b) when they do break, they shatter rather than breaking into two nice halves.